The re-emergence of Sinclair Lewis as a paradigmatic American novelist, a potential result of Richard Lingeman's new biography, could well cause any number of graduate students in fiction-writing programs around the country to reconsider their aspirations. Lewis was a productive writer of lively intelligence and style who got wonderful reviews and made lots of money and, by the way, was the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, but as Lingeman makes painfully clear, his life was longer and even less happy than that of his near-contemporary, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and before his death he and everyone else believed that he had outlived his talent by several decades. Lewis's posthumous reputation, unlike Fitzgerald's, did not rise by easy stages to immortal status. Rather it wavered in the territory of respectability for a while, then was torpedoed, according to Lingeman, by a biographer, Mark Schorer, in 1961, 10 years after Lewis's death.

The Nobel Prize, which he won in 1930, should have crowned Lewis's career but actually hastened its decline, not, perhaps, because Lewis himself grew cautious or overconfident, but because his selection was the subject of intense scrutiny and controversy; every literary pundit had an opinion on whether he deserved it, and many of the opinions were negative. His talents and accomplishments were furiously called into question while he was still in midcareer, and though he had supporters -- Edith Wharton telegraphed her congratulations -- the fact is that he never quite recovered, either as a writer or as a Famous Author.

Lewis was born in 1885, the third son of a small-town Minnesota doctor. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was 6 -- maybe the worst possible age -- after three years in and out of sanitariums. He soon acquired a stepmother, with whom he became close, and who encouraged his pleasure in reading and his intellectual ambitions. His novels did not address the emotional wounds that resulted from the death of his mother, but his writings were remarkably sensitive to the compromises that women were required to make; he was an early feminist who refined his analysis of women's lives over his whole writing career. Lewis knew that his childhood in Sauk Centre had given him empathy for all sorts of disempowered groups -- he was teased and taunted for his odd habits and his appearance until he was well into his 20's. Not only did he read books and use big words, he was also strange-looking, with a mop of red hair and very bad skin, which he attempted to cure with various treatments that only succeeded in making it worse. Thinking that in going off to Yale he would find a larger, more tolerant world, Lewis instead found something worse than Sauk Centre -- Eastern snobbery and an even crueler, more casual dismissal.

But Lewis did what Midwesterners are supposed to do -- he buckled down and worked at his writing, and in the meantime married a beautiful and sophisticated Eastern girl, Grace Livingstone Hegger, who had a career and aspirations of her own. He got his stories into the best and most lucrative magazines, and he made friends with influential men. H. L. Mencken was in some sense his mentor, and encouraged his satiric bent. Lewis was enormously productive. In the decade and a half following Yale (he left in 1906 without graduating), he published three novels and numerous stories and many other pieces as well. He worked at editing and newspapering. He and Gracie traveled restlessly around the country and to Europe. Gracie, perhaps, was looking for a home where they could raise their son, but Lewis seems to have been resisting fixing upon an actual choice.

In 1920, a new publishing company started by Lewis's friend Alfred Harcourt published ''Main Street,'' Lewis's indictment of small-town American life in general and Sauk Centre in particular. Lewis was 35. The publication of ''Main Street'' ranks with that of ''Uncle Tom's Cabin'' as one of the few literary events in American history that proved to be a political and social event as well. The book sold hundreds of thousands of copies. As with the Stowe novel, Americans took up what appeared to be a violent critique of themselves with great enthusiasm, and were ready to read it, judge it and discuss it. Lewis followed it very quickly with ''Babbitt,'' which lampooned American boosterism, ''Arrowsmith,'' which explored the corruption of science and medical research, and ''Elmer Gantry,'' which took on revivalism in particular and organized religion in general. Every book sold fantastically. Americans could not stop paying attention to their home-grown ''scold,'' as Lewis called himself.

Then came the breakdown of his marriage, the stock market crash, the Nobel Prize and the Great Depression. By now, Lewis was spending a lot of time in Europe and was involved with the journalist Dorothy Thompson (later to be his wife), who preferred Europe to the United States and was an expert on the European political situation. Lewis was also drinking heavily and offending most of his friends and supporters with his crass behavior. He wrote more novels. ''Dodsworth'' and ''It Can't Happen Here'' were his biggest successes, both artistically and commercially, but his particular insights and gifts had had their day. Soon, Thompson and Lewis went their separate ways.

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Lewis took up with a much younger woman, broke with Harcourt and tried again with a novel about race, a novel about feminism and several others. He died in 1951 of the effects of advanced alcoholism, at the age of 66. As Lingeman tells Lewis's story, it is all too depressing, depressing to the point of ''why bother?''

Lingeman might have told it differently, though, because Lewis had plenty of energy and even charm. He was a gifted mimic. Dorothy Thompson recalled listening to him giving a description of an upcoming commemoration of the Russian Revolution ''after the manner of Vachel Lindsay, Swinburne, Tennyson, Browning and Wordsworth.'' More important, Lewis's best novels are well worth reading, and not merely as social documents. ''Main Street'' is not as shapely as some novels, but it is smart and lively. The characters are skillfully drawn and Lewis's insights into their psychology are subtle and compelling. It is not depressing, and neither are the other novels.

Lewis's idiosyncratic combination of critical intelligence and humanity comes across far better in his novels than in Lingeman's biography, which often degenerates into a list of events, few of which reveal anything about Lewis's inner life. Lingeman does not seem to have an overriding theme or a general theory of Lewis. He follows him around, and Lewis sometimes appears in the distance, but he never comes forth. Who he is is lost in the detail of what he did.

In fact, the novel and the biography are diametrically opposed forms of literature. Whereas the novel evokes what life feels like as it is experienced, the biography sticks with what is known, and experience is all hedged about with caution. Milan Kundera once wrote, ''A novelist's biographers unmake what the novelist made and remake what he unmade.'' Perhaps Lingeman might have evoked Lewis more successfully if he had dared to imagine him more fully. Certainly, though Lewis wrote 23 novels and planned several others, a more extensive and sensitive reading of Lewis's works, and a theory of how they developed (as opposed to details of how they got written), would have helped flesh out the novelist. But Lingeman seems to feel that he doesn't have the space to devote to too much analysis of the novels. On the other hand, he doesn't fully explore and portray many of the events he mentions either.

But what is a novelist to do when his reputation has gone into undeserved decline? Someone at least has to get his name out in front of the people so that they think to look up his shelf at the earth's biggest bookstore. In spite of the Depression and World War II and all the intervening history, ''Main Street,'' ''Babbitt,'' ''Elmer Gantry,'' ''Dodsworth'' and ''Arrowsmith'' are still around, big as life, as unchangeably natural to the American landscape as Jay Gatsby. Not every critique of American life has to be lyrical and bittersweet. There is room for the confrontational scold, the man with a political theory. If Lingeman's biography gets Lewis back into circulation, then it has done enough.

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A version of this review appears in print on January 20, 2002, on Page 7007010 of the National edition with the headline: All-American Iconoclast. Today's Paper|Subscribe